Stephen Elop’s awkward Windows Phone moment at Nokia

Stephen Elop might have one of the hardest jobs in technology right now. Taking the helm of Nokia in September, after leading Microsoft’s Office unit beforehand, the new chief executive has had to deal out layoffs, disappoint investors, fend off acquisition rumors, face irate shareholders and – perhaps worst of all – tell Nokia employees years of hard work would be abandoned.

A feature from Businessweek, published today, digs into Elop’s first six months at Nokia, and starts off with a chilly scene from March:

Without slides or props, Elop stood in the town’s gymnasium and explained his signature decision as chief executive officer: to dump Nokia’s homemade Symbian software, which has shipped on some 400 million phones, in favor of Microsoft’s nine-month-old Windows Phone 7 software that runs on a mere 4 million. Elop spoke in his usual manner, an engineer’s earnest, you-know-as-well-as-I-do appeal to reason. As he marched through his logic, the Nokia employees, aware that their new boss had only recently arrived from the very company whose software they would now be humiliatingly forced to use, betrayed no signs of emotion. Rather, a heavy silence filled the room, as if Elop were a defense attorney being watched for signs of inconsistency.

Much of what Elop had to say wasn’t news to his audience, but it was still distressing. In his measured telling, Apple and Google (GOOG) had changed the industry from handset-focused to software-focused. Symbian had fallen too far behind to have any hope of catching up. Worse, the company’s great hope for the future—a software platform created with chipmaker Intel (INTC), called MeeGo—wasn’t ready to pick up the slack. He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world’s biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia’s corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google’s software. “It just didn’t feel right,” Elop says to the crowd. “We’d be just another company distributing Android. That’s not Nokia! We need to fight!”

Silence.

Some more highlights from the Businessweek piece:

Elop took 57 international trips from September through January to nail down strategy.

He is already using a working Windows Phone Nokia device.

Elop first met with Nokia Chairman Jorma Ollila about the CEO gig in June 2010, over breakfast at a Redmond hotel.

In November, when Elop was in Bellevue to talk with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about a partnership, Ballmer sent a stretch-limo. “I wanted to get out and walk the last block” to campus, Elop told Businessweek.

There was a short window to make the deal – from November to early February.